BACKGROUND

The Election Law Clinic, along with co-counsel Protect Democracy and Altshuler Berzon, is representing overseas civilian and military voters voters who voted in the 2024 election for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court and are now at imminent risk of being retroactively disenfranchised. Plaintiffs all voted in accordance with state and federal election rules in place at the time of the 2024 election, which explicitly did not require them (and, functionally, did not allow them to) submit a copy of their photo identification along with their absentee ballot. After all the votes in the 2024 election were counted, however, the losing candidate challenged the validity of Plaintiffs' votes - and the votes of thousands of similarly situated voters across counties where voter registration data suggested that voters disproportionately supported his opponent - for not submitting a copy of their photo identification along with their absentee ballots. More than five months after the election, the North Carolina Supreme Court concluded, for the first time, that the state's voter ID law did apply to overseas civilian and military voters. As a result, the state board of elections was ordered to presumptively disqualify votes cast by this category of voters in the challenged counties, whose votes will be discarded unless they can provide additional "verification" of the validity of their vote in an unprecedented 30-day "cure" process.

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